


The Quiet Ones

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Advent Fics 2014 [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, HP: Epilogue Compliant, M/M, Present Tense, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:23:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2653529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco has been an alcoholic for years, but only Harry notices it when he comes to know and love the man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Ones

**Author's Note:**

> Another Advent fic, for vaysh, who gave me the prompt that is the summary.

Draco takes Harry to see the Manor’s wine cellars not long after they start dating. Harry isn’t sure why, at the time. He stands in the darkness lit only by Draco’s  _Lumos_ Charm, and gapes at shelves and bottles and colors and glass and shadows, and it all feels like an alien world, even more than the silky sheets on the beds where Draco presses him or the gilded decorations Harry sometimes notices in random corners of the Manor.  
  
“This is mine now,” says Draco, standing tall with his wand shining. “Since my father’s gone.”  
  
Draco never speaks of his father dying, only leaving. Harry nods, and watches Draco reach for a bottle of wine, and then they go upstairs, and Draco drinks it, in careful glasses and with careful hands.  
  
*  
  
Harry isn’t a teetotaler any more than he’s a virgin. He can appreciate a good drink, and he drinks all the time, with Ron in pubs and at the Burrow when he goes over for Sunday dinner and sometimes when the particularly strong memory of how his marriage simply broke apart like a calving iceberg overwhelms him.  
  
He doesn’t appreciate wine, though. Draco calls him uncultured, but since he also likes to gasp that when he’s pressing Harry down on his knees and taking him from behind, Harry doesn’t pay much attention.  
  
So he doesn’t drink the bottles that Draco brings up from the cellars, or has house-elves bring up from the cellars. Draco does. It doesn’t seem to affect him much. Oh, his cheeks get bright and he laughs more often and sometimes he shakes his head and gives Harry a smile that makes Harry smile back instead of burn.  
  
But it’s never  _bad._ It’s never like Draco spends all night vomiting into the loo. It’s never like he turns red like Uncle Vernon and yells, even.  
  
It’s never bad, and that’s why it takes Harry as long to notice as he does.  
  
*  
  
A curse wakes Harry—Draco muttering, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” to himself, not attacking him—and Harry blinks and rolls over to cast a simple  _Incendio_ at the hearth in Draco’s bedroom, where the fire has burned low.  
  
Draco stands in the doorframe of the attached bathroom, and his hands cover his face, and blood drips between his fingers. Harry sits up with a half-cry.  
  
Draco immediately takes his hands away, so that Harry can see the cut on his face, and shakes his head. “So stupid,” he mutters, and gives Harry a lopsided smile. “I was trying not to wake you and I didn’t want anyone to see, and I’ve already failed on both counts.”  
  
“You haven’t failed,” Harry murmurs, and gets up to see what he can do. Draco turns away as he approaches, shielding his eyes from the light of the fire.  
  
“Oh, it’s all right,” says Harry, a bit impatient, because he thought they’d got past the pretended necessity of hiding injuries and illnesses from each other. Draco has let Harry treat him during colds and when he had a broken leg and during that awful scare last year when they’d thought he had dragonpox, which killed his grandfather. There’s no reason for him to change his mind now.   
  
Draco hesitates some more, just to be a pain in the arse, and then drops his hand. Harry can make out a shallow cut above his left eye. It’s longer and thinner than Harry thought it was, but quite a bleeder, and Harry makes a noise of concern as he traces his wand along the line, healing it up.  
  
“What happened?” he asks, so involved in the healing that at first he doesn’t notice the lack of an answer.  
  
But eventually he does, and he glances up at Draco, frowning. Draco turns his head away and stares out the window, which at this time of night shows nothing but soothing stars. Draco can’t sleep with too much light. The fire’s a compromise, because Harry can’t sleep in pure darkness.  
  
“Draco?” Harry murmurs.  
  
“I fell,” says Draco, and his voice is loud enough to make Harry jump, after the quietness that settled between them. “Is that what you want to hear? I  _fell_ , and cut my eye on the counter.” He shakes his head back with a strange, ugly laugh. “That’s how weak I am. That’s how stupidly I managed to fall.”  
  
“You’re not weak and stupid,” Harry says. Merlin, it’s like a flashback to the first days when they got together, working off an attraction to eyes and hands and lips that nearly dissolved in the fire-spark of their words. Draco was always bristling and telling Harry what Harry _must_ think of him: that he was weak, pathetic, cowardly, a killer. And Harry was always correcting him and making things worse with the correction, like when he told Draco that he didn’t think Draco was a killer because he’d been there when Draco refused to kill Dumbledore. “I just wanted to know how it happened.”  
  
“It happened because I’m an idiot,” Draco says roughly, and tears away from him. He keeps his face averted, hiding the new pink line, as he climbs into bed and tugs the covers up after him. “Go in and clean up the blood if you want. I’m going to sleep.”  
  
Harry steps into the bathroom and sees a smear of red on the counter, exactly as Draco told him he would. He shakes his head and cleans it up with an easy flick of his wand, frowning.  
  
Draco seems embarrassed about this to a degree that Harry doesn’t understand. They’re not kids anymore. A simple mistake shouldn’t be enough to alienate them from each other. And this was easy enough to fix.  
  
It’s only when Harry’s drifting off to sleep beside Draco, his arm lying over Draco’s shoulders and moved by his easy breath, that he realizes something. It  _was_ an easy fix, and it therefore makes no sense that Draco didn’t take care of it with his own wand.  
  
*  
  
After that, for no reason except that he likes to watch the people he cares about and he’s a trained Auror, Harry finds himself observing Draco.  
  
And he sees the way Draco lays his wand aside in the evenings and never picks it up again after a certain time—unless a letter comes from Hogwarts with Scorpius’s stubborn owl and Draco has to enchant the stupid bird to get it to drop the thing. Draco’s devotion to his son is his one constant, the one exception to every rule.  
  
Harry finds that charming, himself. He doesn’t think he could be with someone who  _didn’t_ love their children.  
  
(An image of Uncle Vernon drifts across his mind and is quickly suppressed. He doesn’t want to think about Vernon Dursley in any context, ever again).  
  
But other than that, it seems to be the hour that controls the laying aside, which Harry can’t fathom. Draco wields his wand with utter grace and skill during the day, with love for even simple household and Cleaning Charms, maybe because he remembers the few years after the war when he couldn’t use one at all.  
  
So it goes, the observations parading through Harry’s mind and passing away again, until Harry finally realizes that Draco puts it aside when he starts drinking, and then carefully out of reach, like on the mantel, from the small bursts of wandless magic he’s capable of. That’s where it was the night he fell in the bathroom.  
  
*  
  
“Harry? What are you doing down here?”  
  
Harry cannot say “Counting your wine bottles,” so he shrugs and picks a bottle at random. “Trying to inspire myself to a taste for fine wine,” he says.  
  
He thinks Draco will laugh, appreciating the joke, or maybe take it seriously and launch into an earnest explanation of how to cultivate his palate. He doesn’t expect Draco to snatch the bottle from him and hold it like a second wand, defensively, down close to his side. His hand is cupped like he’ll draw his own real wand, in fact.  
  
Harry finds his mouth a little open, his eyes blinking. He feels like a suspect he himself challenged a few days ago, one who couldn’t believe the  _Great_ Harry Potter capable of any real magic.  
  
Draco turns his head away a second later, and says, “But you might drop it,” and goes back up the stairs. Harry follows, slowly.  
  
Draco grimaces when he pours the wine into his glass, and Harry knows that it must not be a favorite of his. “Do you want me to have the house-elves take that back to the cellars?” he asks.  
  
“But it’s open now,” Draco says, the way he earlier said that Harry could drop the bottle, and begins to sip slowly from it, his eyes on the fire. Harry sits down next to him and starts a bunch of conversations that all go nowhere.  
  
As they usually do about this time of the evening, he has begun to notice.  
  
*  
  
No one else seems to be worried. That much, Harry also notices.  
  
Of course, his friends wouldn’t be, would they, when their biggest concern is his happiness, and their dismissive glances, their wary shrugs and their silences, are the prices Harry pays for having Draco as a lover. Harry loves them, but there’s a limit to what he can expect them to see or care about.  
  
He’s the bridge between two worlds, and he doesn’t mind being that. Not for Draco’s sake. Not for his friends’ sake. Any more than he really minds being a half-blood, bridge between the Muggle and the wizarding worlds.  
  
But he  _is_ surprised that Scorpius never hints anything in his letters. That’s an observant boy and a careful one. Draco lets Harry read Scorpius’s owls, though, and they’re always full of cheerful chatter, Slytherin this and Gobstones that and Quidditch the other. They make Harry nostalgic for his time at Hogwarts, and they make it easy for him to smile at Scorpius when he visits over the holidays—that and Scorpius’s unexpected friendship with James and immediate brotherly relationship with Lily. He and Al are still circling each other to prove who’s the better Slytherin and Potions maker and Quidditch Seeker, but Harry’s confident they’ll settle down eventually.  
  
Scorpius’s letters are no help, though, forcing Harry to look further afield.  
  
He composes one careful owl to Narcissa, living in exile in Ireland, in a place that Draco only describes as “wild country” and Harry has finally figured out means one of the shadowy places half in and half through a sort of Faerie. Harry doesn’t know if his letter will make it to her at all. He tries to be respectful and to hint at the problem instead of talking about it outright.  
  
It doesn’t matter. The letter never comes back, and the owl takes a month, and all its feathers have turned white.  
  
Lucius is in the grave—no help. Andromeda might be interested, but Harry has got to know her as an immensely warm-hearted, kind, caring,  _clumsy_ woman, as clumsy in matters of the heart as Tonks was in body. She and Harry had a number of fights about Remus before they settled into an excellent understanding.  
  
For this situation, though, her method of caring is all wrong. Harry knows he has to be delicate.  
  
He watches Draco, and he watches the hours that Draco lays his wand aside increase and the flush in his cheeks mount, and one day he decides to make an experiment.  
  
*  
  
“Do you ever think about Astoria anymore?”  
  
Draco makes a violent sloshing motion with his goblet, which he has just filled with a serving of his favorite drink. Beer, not wine, Harry has seen over the last few months. Or he thinks it’s beer. Draco tried to explain why it was different from the Muggle drink of the same name once, but he lost Harry around the length of fermentation.  
  
“What does  _that_ mean?” Draco whispers, and Harry braces himself. Only a few months ago, the mention of either Astoria’s or Ginny’s names between them would be enough to set off a furious tirade from Draco.  
  
But then Draco notices something that seems to concern him much more: the splash of dark liquid on the couch cushions. He sets his goblet carefully down on the edge of the table, the little table that sparkles mahogany in the light of the fire, and runs his finger over the dark patch.  
  
Then he looks at Harry, and there is mourning in his face, and a fury that makes Harry think of Snape running from the Astronomy Tower.  
  
“ _Look_ what you made me do,” he says.  
  
He picks up his goblet and retreats into the bedroom, where he locks the door. Harry can’t get in all night unless he’s willing to force the door, and he’s not.  
  
That, Harry thinks, settles that.  
  
*  
  
Harry sits back in his chair and puts the book down. He asked Hermione for a book on alcoholism without revealing why he wanted it. Normally, he wouldn’t be able to get away with that, but since she had children, Hermione has changed her comments from “tell me what you’re reading and why” to “I’m just glad you’re reading.”  
  
None of the ideas in the book really fit the situation with Draco, though, at least as far as Harry can tell. Draco’s not violent. He’s not drinking himself to sleep every night. He’s not abusing Harry. Harry might even think that the book proved Draco wasn’t an alcoholic at all, except that he sees the way Draco curls around the bottle and lays his wand aside.  
  
There is, unfortunately, nothing in a Muggle book about what to do when a wizard loves something more than his magic.  
  
“What are you reading?”  
  
Harry looks up. Draco has come in from his study, where he locks himself to be private when he’s dealing with the ledgers and monies of his Potions ingredients business. Harry opens his mouth to answer, but sees something that freezes his jaws shut.  
  
Draco—who never drinks before that certain hour of the evening, who lays his wand aside at that hour partially so he won’t perform magic drunk, Harry’s certain—has a glass of beer in his hand.  
  
Draco sees where his gaze is tending, and tucks the glass close to himself. “I’m an adult,” he says. “I support myself. I can do what I want with my own money.”  
  
Harry doesn’t answer, but drops his eyes. Draco turns around and walks back to the study with steps that he’s making an effort to keep steady.  
  
It’s going to be a little harder to help Draco now that he’s  _aware_ Harry is trying to help, of course. But that isn’t going to keep Harry from trying.  
  
*  
  
“Did you know that you spend more time drunk than sober?”  
  
Harry has considered all sorts of things. Sneaky Sobriety Charms. Talking to Draco right before he drinks. Trying to keep him out of the wine cellar at night. Challenging Draco to a duel before he can lay his wand aside.  
  
But in the end, Harry wants honesty between them, and even if Draco is prickly and refuses to talk at first, he thinks this is the best way. And he’s counted the hours in the day. He has numbers to back him up if Draco argues.  
  
Draco gives him a single startled glance, and then picks up his glass of wine and looks at it. “You can’t get really drunk on wine,” he says. They are at dinner, and the candles flicker as Harry leans forwards.  
  
“No, but you’re drinking beer now. And you got drunk enough to fall in the bathroom that one night. And you’re drinking earlier.”  
  
Draco’s face goes stony. “I don’t see why how I spend my free time is any concern of yours.”  
  
Harry gapes, and then says, because Draco won’t, “I love you. Of  _course_ I’m concerned.”  
  
Draco’s free hand, laid on the table, trembles. Then he gets up, and goes and locks himself in the bedroom again.  
  
Harry sits back and wonders what his next tactic should be.  
  
*  
  
In the end, he does seek out Theodore Nott, because Draco seems close to him and because Harry can’t believe he’s the  _only_ one who’s noticed. He’s observant when he goes to a crime scene, but he still regularly misses cues when he’s speaking to ordinary people.  
  
And while Draco is no ordinary person to him and hasn’t been since the moment Harry first saw him really smile in the wake of Harry’s divorce, Harry can’t say that he knows him as well as someone who’s been his friend since they were nine, or maybe seven.  
  
Nott refuses to reply to his first owl. Maybe he thinks that Harry wants to scold him for being an evil Slytherin or something. Harry sends another owl, saying only that he thinks something is wrong with Draco and he wants to discuss it with someone who he knows cares about Draco.  
  
Nott changes the time of their meeting twice, before he finally agrees to two on Saturday in the Leaky Cauldron. Harry is relieved that he wakes up that morning without a firecall from Kingsley saying there’s something vitally important that needs his attention as Head Auror. Not that it’s not mostly paperwork anyway, but sometimes it’s  _vital_ paperwork.  
  
The depth of his relief as he enters the pub and looks around for Nott alerts him to just how much he cares about this, how much he wants to help Draco. Well, good. He doesn’t want to be someone stranded out in a wasteland of indifference, ever.  
  
And if he loves Draco more than Draco loves him? It’s possible, and Harry’s not particularly bothered by it.  
  
“Thanks for coming,” Harry says, as he slides into the chair across from Nott.  
  
Nott makes an abrupt gesture. He’s an abrupt sort of person, or so Harry’s thought, the few times they met since the war. He has an intense face and the sort of nose that thrusts itself into everything. He leans forwards now, not even pretending to drink out of the mug that stands by his elbow as camouflage, and stares Harry.  
  
“What’s wrong with Draco?”  
  
Harry can reward bluntness with bluntness, especially when it comes from a Slytherin he thought would be addicted to double-dealing and talking around the subject. “He’s drinking too much.”  
  
There’s a frozen moment when he thinks Nott will tell him something. Then Nott leans back in his chair and makes a disgusted noise, which makes his nose bob.  
  
“And here I thought you were going to tell me something  _real._ But at bottom, you’re still the sort of Gryffindor who hates everyone else having fun, aren’t you?”  
  
“What?” Harry stares at Nott. He expected to be accused of several things by one of Draco’s friends, like not caring enough to do something about it before now, but not this. “He had  _rules,_ and now he’s breaking them. He’s drinking earlier in the day. He’s drinking more. He’s drinking more than just wine. And he’s casting when he’s drunk, which I never saw him do before.” Draco almost lit a piece of parchment on fire the other day when his Summoning Charm went wrong and it looped lazily towards the hearth instead of towards him.  
  
Nott shakes his head, impatient now. “You think that any kind of drinking that’s done in private and not after a major Quidditch victory is dangerous. It’s not. Draco’s been doing this for years. He has trauma to cope with after the war.” He gives Harry a very direct glance, and Harry has no need of Legilimency to read his thoughts.  
  
“Yeah, I had trauma, too,” Harry says. “It broke up my marriage.” This time, Nott is the one who looks wrongfooted, which is satisfying. “But I still think this is different, and I’m not someone who minds a little Firewhisky. Or a  _lot_ of Firewhisky,” he adds, because he can see Nott opening his mouth to say that. “Look, will you just come talk to Draco? I think you’ll see the difference.”  
  
“I would never visit his home without permission,” Nott says, colder than winter. “And you don’t have the ability to give it for him.” He snorts and stands up and departs the pub without a word, leaving Harry sitting there and staring down at his dim reflection in the small, smeared table.  
  
*  
  
Harry thinks that maybe Nott is right, and he’s overreacting. Maybe Draco breaking his rules isn’t cause for concern. It’s just the way things are, and Harry should be there for Draco in the ways Draco most needs him to be, without  _worrying_ so much.  
  
But as the days pass, he becomes convinced that he’s right and it’s Nott, who after all hasn’t seen Draco in a while, who’s wrong.  
  
It’s the little things, like the way Draco stares off into the distance whenever he doesn’t have a glass in his hand, like he’s dreaming of it. It’s the way that Draco avoids his eyes when Harry asks him if he’s feeling well.  
  
And then there’s the big things, like Draco asking Harry to sleep on the couch all night instead of in the bedroom with him.  
  
“What?” Harry was looking forward to curling up with Draco and at least listening to his heartbeat for a while that evening. He puts down the pile of paperwork he had to bring home with him—there’s no avoiding it—and stares at Draco incredulously. “Why should I?”  
  
Draco looks away from him with a gesture of his head that Harry recognizes but hasn’t seen since the war. That hangdog look, that ashamed look, as he does something that he knows he shouldn’t but he’s going to do it anyway.  
  
“I want some privacy, sometimes. And it’s still my house.”  
  
Draco has never been like this since they got together. They have fight sometimes, sure, but he’s never  _cruel_. Harry stands up with one hand already reaching towards the Floo powder and his magic thrumming in his body.  
  
“If that’s the way you feel, I have a bed  _at my home_ ,” Harry says, and starts to call out the name of Grimmauld Place, where he moved after the divorce from Ginny.  
  
“Harry!”  
  
Draco sounds so panicked that Harry, reluctantly, turns back. And Draco stops lunging towards him and becomes cold and distant again in seconds.  
  
“It’s my right to demand privacy sometimes,” Draco says, and goes into the bedroom, and shuts the door behind him. This time, Harry knows it would do no good if he  _did_ try to force it. Draco’s cast a Locking Charm, and he’s always been good at those.  
  
Harry sits down, Floo powder trickling through his fingers to the carpet, and thinks that strange behavior through. It seems to him that part of Draco wants him gone, wants to self-destruct in peace.  
  
But there’s part that wants to reach out, too, and that was the part that made sure Harry stayed here tonight.  
  
Which means:   
  
No, he’s not wrong. And he’s going to help Draco, no matter what it takes.  
  
*  
  
It takes Harry a few days, and the cooperation of the house-elves. At first they don’t want to do what he tells them, since technically he’s not their master and he wants them to keep it secret from Draco.  
  
But then, maybe after one of them has to clean up some blood and vomit from the bathroom, they become willing co-conspirators, and Harry has the enormous pile of evidence he needs to confront Draco with.  
  
Draco comes out of his study at two, as usual lately, squinting as if he’s the one who needs glasses. That indicates a mild stage of drunkenness, and that’s what Harry needs.  
  
He stops and stares at the pile of bottles in the middle of the drawing room, then glances at Harry in the chair beyond. “What’s this?” he asks.  
  
“This,” Harry says, and puts his paperwork shield down, “is the remains of everything you’ve drunk in the last five days, Draco.”  
  
Draco stares at him, then points to a small patch of ashes on the floor next to the bottles. “And what about this?”  
  
“That,” Harry says, and snaps his fingers a little, calling a house-elf who will speak up for him if he needs to, “is the photograph of Astoria and your son that burned when you were staggering around drunk and yelling at her for divorcing you, because Scorpius needs two parents.” It took the elf’s cooperation both to bring the ashes here and to tell him what they used to be.  
  
Draco’s hands clench for a second, and he looks as though he will kick out or scream. Harry is prepared in case that happens. He has charms that he can use to protect his ears, his face, his hands. He has elves standing by every Floo entrance in the house and by the doors and windows, too, in case Draco tries to flee.  
  
But instead, Draco sinks slowly down on the couch. He’s staring at the ashes and the bottles as though he’s never seen them before. Harry relaxes, a little.  
  
“I can’t have done that,” Draco whispers. “Not  _all_ that.” His gaze goes back to Harry, insanely hopeful. “You know that I invited Blaise and Pansy over the other night. And you drink sometimes.”  
  
“I never drink wine,” Harry replies levelly. “And Blaise arrived and told me that he wasn’t going to bring Pansy, since he could see what sort of mood you were in.”  
  
“What sort of  _mood_.” Draco puts his hand carefully down on the couch.  
  
“He called it your ‘I hate myself’ mood.” Harry meets Draco’s eyes squarely. “And he said that they don’t hate you, and neither one of them likes to be around when you’re saying that.”  
  
In truth, it took a lot of Harry’s strength to keep from shouting at Blaise. Blaise said that he and Pansy know about these moments and these bouts of drinking, that Draco’s had them for years, and that they’re nothing to be worried about.  
  
Harry wonders now exactly how long this behavior has gone on, and how long Draco’s friends have been dismissing it and turning away from it.  
  
On one level, he can understand. They grew up with some secrets between them, because of the first war and their Death Eater parents, and then came the second war. They never talked about their feelings, what happened to them during the war, the way Harry did with his friends. That’s not the way they are. They give each other space by looking aside from things, shrugging them off, dismissing them, and continuing to be friends.  
  
That works fine, most of the time. Harry won’t blame Blaise, or Pansy, or Nott. He won’t blame Astoria, although he now wonders if this is part of the reason she walked away.  
  
But he won’t let them insist that Draco’s drinking isn’t real or a problem, either. Not when they have this huge mound of evidence on the floor between them.  
  
“Blaise wasn’t here,” Draco says, loudly enough that Harry thinks some glimmer of memory is starting to creep into his head. “I didn’t invite him. Or he was here, and I drank with him, and I don’t remember it.”  
  
Harry looks him straight in the face. “At least you admit that the way you drink can affect your behavior sometimes.”  
  
Draco has the ugliest flush that Harry’s ever seen, even during some of the times that he was dead drunk. He rips his head away in another direction, but Harry and the elves have piled the bottles around the room like fortress ramparts. There’s no place to get away from them.  
  
“I,” says Draco, and works his tongue around his lips, as though he’s trying to soothe away an itch. “I need a drink.”  
  
“Yes,” Harry says. “You always do.”  
  
A new kind of stillness comes over Draco, as though he’s a rabbit crouching in front of a hunter. He looks at Harry, and Harry can see the moment that light starts dawning in his face.  
  
“No,” he whispers.  
  
“Yes.” Harry looks at him with pity, but no compassion. If he had compassion, he would stop this dreadful proceeding. He knows it. But Draco’s friends and maybe even his wife and son have all treated him with compassion, and it hasn’t worked. “You’re drunk now. I’ve been getting letters about you slipping in your business, too.”  
  
“ _I_  didn’t receive any.”  
  
“You set one on fire the other night. You don’t remember that, either?”  
  
Draco bows his head and rests his brow in his hands. “It’s—it’s so easy for things like that to seem like dreams,” he whispered. “Or fever visions. It was a vision, wasn’t it?”  
  
Harry’s heart starts to beat a little easier. He knows it  _will_ be easier, from here on out, although perhaps Draco will be a bit more obnoxious, too. “No. It wasn’t.”  
  
Draco bends his head and stares at his hands, waiting for them to change—do something, tell him the truth, maybe. Make this easier. Harry waits. Draco finally looks back at him and says, “Assume this is true.”  
  
Harry nods. This is the point that he set up this little ambush to reach. Draco hasn’t talked about it, hasn’t told his friends about this, hasn’t asked for help. He has to be willing to do that before Harry can do anything.  
  
“Why has no one else told me about it?”  
  
That’s the hardest question, and Harry inhales and exhales before he responds. “I think a lot of your friends didn’t notice. Or they didn’t want to ask questions.” That must have been the case with Blaise and Pansy, who have seen Draco’s behavior firsthand, and still left without much more than a glance at their friend. “And other people—they don’t know you as well, Draco. Since Scorpius started attending Hogwarts and you started conducting your business by owl order, how many people see you on a daily basis?”  
  
Draco closes his eyes. “I think that was part of it, you know. Feeling alone. Lonely. Like I’d failed by failing in my marriage, and—not knowing what to do. The business was part of what let me escape and cope with it, but not as well as I’d hoped, if this was the result.”  
  
Harry nods. He feels as though someone has stuck spikes in his throat, at the expression on Draco’s face.  
  
But before he can reach out or say anything, Draco opens his eyes. “But the one good decision I made when I was acting like this is to start dating you.” And he reaches across the distance between them and catches Harry’s hand.  
  
Harry smiles.  
  
*  
  
It’s not easy. It never will be. There are cold letters from Astoria, an outraged visit from Scorpius, Nott refusing to admit that Harry was right, Harry’s friends worrying that he’s devoting so much time to Draco that he has none for himself. And worries, always, from people who don’t need to interfere, but for some reason think who Harry is dating is a national emergency.  
  
It will take years for everything to be repaired, for the man that Harry fell in love with to fully emerge.  
  
But as he watches some of the bottles of wine disappear from Draco’s cellars, as he watches him start to obey his own rules again, as he joins him once more in bed, Harry thinks that maybe that is a good thing.  
  
Because it means he hasn’t seen all of Draco yet. Part of him is still buried, waiting, yet to awake, like a statue still buried in the stone that makes it up.  
  
And that means something even more wonderful and beautiful could emerge from that stone, carved by the air, by patience, by life.  
  
Harry is filled with longing to see him.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
